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The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo, 2008

Old Ginseng Root

Austere tale of a third generation Korean living just across the border in China near Yanji. The grandfather was moved to China by the Japanese for labor. The father and uncle become Ginseng hunters and teach the son their secrets. The first part of the novel is a compact but detailed look at the art of hunter for wild Ginseng plants in the mountains. Once found, the Ginseng plant must be very carefully dug up without damaging the often crooked and complex root. The value of the plant depends on its age but any damage will leave the root worthless. It may require hours to dig a single root.

Written in the first person by the son, we are taken into an austere self sufficient life. The hunter lives alone and enjoys his solitude. He tried living with a woman once but it didn’t work out. He visits a brothel during his monthly trips to Yanji in the warm seasons to sell his ginseng and buy supplies.

During one one trip he meets a Korean prostitute and for the first time can’t get her out of his mind. They start meeting in parks during his visits and we learn her tragic story and the start of the novel’s preoccupation with the story of the Korean people under the incompetent rule of Kim Jong-il, son of North Korea’s founding dictator. We learn of the constant reeducation and intimidation as the country falls apart and the people starve. The Korean prostitute had a husband who worked in the mines and a daughter who attended school. The mine closed and her husband was detained and never returns. The daughter dropped out of school to help her mother scrounge for food. They spot the daughter’s former teacher scrounging for food and realize the school is closed. The daughter is killed by government authorities and the woman runs away to China where she is taken to the brothel by a trucker. She realizes she will be fed and sheltered so stays in the brothel.

As things deteriorate in Korea, more and more cross the shallow river to China looking for food, jobs, or trade. The Chinese government offers rewards to return illegal Koreans to the border and pressure businesses to get rid of their Korean workers. A young Korean girl visits the ginseng hunter’s garden to steal corn and the hunter decides to try to take care of her. He realizes he will need help to raise a young girl and goes to the brothel to try to buy the prostitute but she is no longer working there. He travels downriver looking for her as winter sets in. He realizes that the industrial plants built on the river on the Korean side are all shut down.

The hunter is loaned a hand gun by his neighbor to help protect himself from encroaching Koreans including armed and starving soldiers, who are starting to cross the river looking for food. He can’t bring himself to use the gun, but he does assist in turning over some Koreans to be returned to the border for which he receives money. For penance he buys all the seaweed from a Korean woman using his bounty money so she can take the money back home.

Bridge to North Korea

The author spent considerable time in Yanji and the surrounding region learning about ginseng hunting and hearing the takes of terrible happenings in North Korea. He assembles some of these stories into a compact, compelling, story. It is not a story of hope but a testimony to the strength and endurance of people under harsh and trying circumstances.

The Pearl Diver, Jeff Talarigo, 2004

Aerial View of Nagashima Leprosarium

The author’s first novel follows the life of a Japanese pearl diver who contracts Hansen’s disease (Leprosy) as a young woman in 1948. As was the practice then, she was sent to an isolated Leper’s colony on a small island at Nagashima. The first drugs that stabilize the disease have just been discovered and she is able to live a full life without the disfigurement of the disease. This being Japan, the disease comes with a shame and stigma that attaches to her whole family and prevents her older sister from marrying. The family abandons her. We follow conditions and treatment in the colony where the patients are treated more as prisoners than as sufferers of a horrible disease. As time passes more drugs are discovered and doctors learn to differentiate contagious from non contagious carriers. It eventually becomes possible for individual patients to reintegrate into society if they wish, but as with prisoners, it takes our heroin some years and several experiments before she tries to return – but never to her home island. Will she remain in society or return to the colony to live out her life? Very readable and a reminder of what it was like to contract an ancient disease that is all but eradicated in much of the world today.

Nagashima Paper Money

The Elephanta Suite, Paul Theroux, 2007

Taj Mahal Hotel and Gateway to India Mumbai

A collection of three short stories explores tourism and global business in contemporary India. The first, appearing first in the New Yorker, follows two wealthy fiftyish Americans, married for 30 years, who vacation at a spa purposely isolated from its surrounding community in a luxurious but totally artificial environment. When they become sexually involved with their masseurs, both native employees are fired. Somewhere along the line, the Americans buy some scarfs made from the hair of endangered antelope. Explores tourism as an isolated and insular world created artificially for the wealthy westerner.

The second story follows a divorced American lawyer, sent to Mumbai to negotiate product outsourcing for American companies. He becomes involved with street prostitutes, falls in love with India and finds excuses to remain. His Indian associate, a Jain from a successful family slowly replaces the American and then delivers him to an ashram where he appears content to remain.

The third story concerns two young American girls out to see India. One meets a rich young Western man and never gets out of Mumbai. The other continues traveling by herself until she meets an aggressive, nasty, fat Indian guy and comes to grieve.

Only the second story retains your interest as the lawyer goes native and we see a reversal of roles. At least each story is short.

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, Kang Zhengguo, 2007

A biography and history of Communist China from the Mao revolution of 1949 to the present through the life of a stubborn, naive, innocent young man who wanted only to be left alone to study ancient Chinese literature, to write about it, and maybe teach. Instead, two innocent letters drew him down the rabbit hole from college to a brickworks laborer to a labor prisoner to a forced labor orchard worker to an adopted peasant with a peasant wife and family.
Xi’an Bell Tower<>
Hua San near Xi’an

Kang grew up in Xi’an the capital of Shaanxi province and one of four capital cities of ancient China. Kang’s father was a heroin and alcohol addict but remained a fully employed engineer. His mother was a college graduate and full time teacher. Kang spent much of his childhood in the two acre Silent Garden home living with his respected Buddhist grandfather who supported the Communist revolution and saw Communism and Buddhism as compatible. Initially his grandfather held important committee positions in the local party. It was his grandfather’s personal library that led Kang to his lifelong long of ancient Chinese literature.

Things seemed all right for the family until the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 after which there was widespread famine and purge after purge, slowly reducing his “landlord” family to increased hardship and poverty. For a time, his grandfather was forced into a tiny apartment but when the owner wanted it back he was returned to a small space in Silent Garden which was allowed to fall into ruins. The most disastrous campaign after the Great Leap Forward was the 1966 Cultural Revolution. This campaign effectively closed schools for ten years and an entire generation of Chinese grew up without much education. It also resulted in sending record numbers of city people to the countryside, some of which were never able to return.
Dr Zhivago
Kang was a mischievous child and so-so student but was accepted to Shaanxi Normal University. When another student in trouble with the authorities was discovered with a letter from Kang, Kang was expelled from College and forced to work in a primitive brickworks. He taught himself Russian and read any Russian literature he could find. When Doctor Zhivago was published, he naively wrote to a university in Russian asking to borrow a copy. This letter got him three imprisonment with forced labor. The title Confessions refers to the numerous confessions and struggle sessions he was forced to undergo. The hardened prisoners helped him learn not to give up information the authorities didn’t already know and to write minimal confessions needed to survive. After release from prison, he was unable to find work in Xi’an and was forced into a job at a remote orchard. While his family suffered greatly from the Cultural Revolution, Kang himself was going through his own nightmare and had little contact with the rampaging students.
Shaanxi Peasants<>
Shaanxi Wheatfields
The book spends a lot of time on the residency registration system which forces everyone to stay where they are registered. The system allowed the regime to keep peasants away from the cities and to exile dissidents to the countryside where they would be unable to return to the cities. Kang was registered in Xi’an, but without hope of finding work, he was a burden on his family. They attempted to arrange a marriage with a peasant girl but could find no-one willing to marry a former political prisoner. Finally they located an old bachelor, in 1972, who was willing to adopt Kang, then 28 years old. This allowed Kang to change his name and become a peasant, hopefully escaping his past. Several years later he married a peasant girl and they had two children. In preparation for his life as a peasant Kang studied clock and electric motor repair in Xi’an before moving to the village. These skills allowed Kang to travel to other villages and supplement the communes meager pay.
Tianamen Square Protest
Finally Mao died in 1976 and subsequent reforms allowed Kang to return to Shaanxi Normal University and have most of his dossier purged. As a graduate student, the ever non conforming Kang chose to write his thesis on an ancient erotic work. His advisor failed him and refused to allow him to graduate. He kept appealing and eventually was allowed to graduate and was later granted his masters degree. Kang taught English at Jiaotong University. In his usual naive blundering fashion, towering over other protesters and appearing clearly in the photos wearing a headband reading “Aim Your Guns Here“, Kang protested the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Kang had managed to keep and listen to short wave radio through much of his ordeal and kept up with events across the country during these protests via radio.

He published a monograph, A Study of Classical Chinese Poetry on Women and by Women, and in 1990 received a letter from Professor Chang of Yale University praising the work. In 1991 Yale University invited Kang to participate in a conference on Women and Literature in Ming-Qing China to be held in 1993. It took Kang the full two years to get the passport and documents needed to attend the conference. Professor Chang turned out to be a woman. Kang returned to China after the conference to the amazement of his friends.

In 1994 Yale invited Kang to become a Chinese language teacher at Yale. To get the documents this time, Kang had to quit his job and give up his apartment before authorities would consider his application. He wanted to bring his family this time and Yale sent documents to support this. The American embassy in Beijing at first refused a visa for Kang’s 18 year old daughter, but Yale pressured them to relent. His wife adjusted well, first working in a day care center, then getting a job at a surgical supply manufacturer in New Haven. His children also adjusted well and have done well in America, which Kang considers his best legacy.

This work is also a reminder that China hasn’t changed much today in human rights terms. Kang was detained for several days in 2000 during his last trip to China for an academic conference. His Tiananmen Square protests and correspondence with friends again came back to haunt him. If not for the pressure from the president of Yale through the State Department, he might have disappeared down the rabbit hole again. After this experience, Kang became an American citizen. Kang points out that economic interests keep human rights news of China to a minimum and we tend to forget how repressive the regime still remains. His conclusions about modern China:

I took these clandestine scenes (illegal mahjong gambling) as a metaphor for the Chinese society in the post-Mao, post-Deng era; it was a large-scale producer of material, spiritual, and even human garbage, hidden behind a curtain of propaganda.

Good thing he no longer goes to China.

For a more detailed indictment of Mao Tse Tung’s reign June Chang, author of Wild Swans, has written Mao: The Unknown Story. see

Ghost Wars, the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll, 2007

Lengthy but meticulous study focusing on the CIA role in Afghanistan, this book is a long delineation of little known detail with a minimum of interpretive conclusion: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Treatment is quite sterile and it is easy to imagine the equally sterile environment and personalities of American policy makers in air conditioned offices in Washington trying to formulate a policy toward a place about which they don’t care, don’t know, and have given almost no thought.

Ronald Reagan and William Casey

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to shore up their communist client government from mujahedin insurgents, Reagan officials saw a golden opportunity to kill Russians by funneling money and arms to the insurgents. After winning Reagan the Republican nomination assuring himself of any cabinet post he wanted, William Casey, who ran spies inside Germany in the closing days of WWII for the OSS, chose to become Director of the CIA. The militant Jesuit trained Casey liked the idea of militant Isamic jihadist fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

He found a close ally in Prince Turki al-Faisal, son of king Faisal, the Georgetown Jesuit educated Saudi head of intelligence the GID. Together they funneled as much as $500,000 a year to the mujahedin. To maintain plausible deniability, (although everyone knew) the money and arms were fed largely through the Pakistan intelligence network, the ISI, giving them enormous power and influence inside Pakistan and out. Compared to the billions Afghanistan was costing the Soviets, the CIA and GID programs seemed an efficient bargain at the time. Afghanistan became the most costly covert effect ever for the CIA.

Ahmed Shah Massoud

The ISI, operating largely independently of Pakistan political and military control was dominated by Pashtun Pashto speaking personnel. They made sure the lions share of money and arms went to loyal Pashtun mujahedin, largely to Hekmatyar. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen and other Shia minority mujahedin received relatively little support until the CIA started dealing directly with these minority leaders like Ahmed Shah Massoud, who dominated the Panjshir Valley and was in the position to cut off the all important Salang highway, the central supply route from the Soviet Union.

A side effect of all this largess was the establishment of training camps for jihadists from Algeria and Morrocco all the way to Indonesia and the Phillipines including a heavy weighting of Arabs. An entire generation of holy warriors was prepared to return to their home countries to fight for the establishment of Ismamic states. The CIA was indifferent to this and only one American, the multilingual Edmund McWilliams voiced any concern over the long term implications of this radical training and indoctrination. At least one school near Peshawar, the epicenter of this training activity was funded and headed by Osama bin Laden. bin Laden was an unfavored son of a powerful family involved in construction for the Saudi royal family. While his half brothers attended school abroad, Osama attended a radical Islamic school at home. After school, in 1981 Osama went to Pakistan to join the jihad. The authors found evidence of only one skirmish between bin Laden’s funded group and the Communists in which a few followers were killed and bin Laden may have been shot in the foot. This small skirmish seemed to have ignited bin Laden into the megalomaniac he became.

At the time of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan there were 33,000 madrassas teaching fundamental Islamic faith and jihad in Pakistan. For an account of a lone American building secular schools in Pakistan see

Firing Stinger Missile

The Soviet Union had spent $48 billion and the US, China, and Saudis spent $12 billion. Afghanistan was in ruins. Afghanistan had more personal weapons than India and Pakistan combined. Anti tank rocket launchers were everywhere, and of 2500 Stinger anti aircraft heat seeking missiles shipped into Afghanistan, over 600 were unaccounted for. The CIA abandoned all efforts in Afghanistan except to attempt to buy back Stinger missiles at $150,000 each to keep them out of Iranian hands. despite CIA efforts, at the time of the Taliban takeover an estimated 100 Stingers were in Iran and the Taliban had 50 or 60 which they refused to give up.

Much of the $12 billion from the US and Saudis had been funneled through the Pakistani ISI. The US cut off most of its other aid and imposed sanctions on Pakistan to try to stop the development of atomic weapons. Pakistan went ahead and tested their first nuclear bomb in 1998. The influence of the US was at a very low point during this period.

After the Soviet departure, Afghanistan descended into a guagmire. The stalemate with the Najibullah communist government was broken when Uzbek communist commander Aburrashid Dostum defected to Massoud’s Supreme Council. Kabul fell to Dostum and Massoud but Pashtun rival Hekmatyar took a portion of Kabul and the two groups proceeded to destroy much of the city and kill thousands of civilians.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 and the US joined Saudi Arabia to expel them, extremist jihadists throughout the world including bin Laden and Hekmatyar denounced the Saudi royal family for inviting an infidel army into the holy land of Saudi Arabia. Surprised, the GID and Turki started funneling even more money to the extremist groups in a effort to neutralize their anti Saudi sentiments. As one GID official put it, “we don’t do operations, we write checks.” One result of the controversy over Kuwait was the Saudi falling out with Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden proposed to the royal family a plan to send 60,000 of his own private fighters to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. When he continued to criticize Saudi policy, he was expelled from Saudi Arabia and later lost his citizenship. He fled to Sudan which was the new safe haven for jidahists after Pakistan.

Mullah Omar

This new stalemate in Afghanistan continued until Durrani Pashtun English speaking Hamid Karzai, living in exile in Pakistan, threw his support behind the Taliban, a disciplined, principled, effective fighting group of radical, rural, Islamic fundamentalists. The ISI and GID started funneling support and weapons to the Taliban who quickly gained control of Kandahar and Herat in the west.

The reentry of the US and CIA was engineered by (what else) oil and gas, this time from Turkmenistan with Houston based Unocal proposing a pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. This crazy idea which even Kissinger called “the triumph of hope over experience” attracted Clinton White House interest. Unocal got an agreement with Turkmenistan but the Benazir Bhutto government preferred an alternative proposal from Bridas of Argentina. The CIA was convinced Bridas had bribed Benazir Bhutto’s notoriously corrupt husband Zardari. Bridas may also have funneled as much as $1 million to Massoud to gain his approval for their pipeline proposal in north Afghanistan. Unocal approached the Taliban.

The US and Saudi Arabia warned Sudan that harboring terrorists would be bad for them. The Sudanese asked Turki of GID if the Saudis would take back bin Laden but they were unwilling. It is still unclear if Sudan offered to give bin Laden to US authorities. In any event, Sudan expelled bin Laden who moved to Jalalabad in Afghanistan. When the Taliban took Jalalabad bin Laden offered $3 million to the Taliban to bribe mujahedin commanders. Defections mounted and the Taliban took Kabul forcing Massoud to retreat to his Panjshir Valley in the north. Bin Laden moved to Kandahar. When the Taliban took Kabul, former communist president Najibullah was completing his translation of the British era history The Great Game into Pashto saying “Afghans keep making the same mistake.” The Taliban executed him. For an account that blames the partition of India to create Pakistan and drew the Afghan border on the British Great Game see

GID’s Turki flew to Kandahar to meet personally with Mullah Omar to try to convince the Taliban to deliver an increasingly Saudi embarrassing bin Laden to the Saudis. Omar seemed to agree but then nothing happened.

Unocal opened a permanent office in Kandahar right across the street from bin Laden’s compound. Unocal built a facility to train Afghani workers to build the pipeline right next to a bin Laden training facility. The CIA which by now had a dedicated bin Laden group never talked to Unocal officials or asked them for help watching bin Laden. Instead, CIA covert operations trained a group of Afghani fighters to try to intercept and capture bin Laden. This group may have ambushed a bin Laden convoy but failed to capture him. The CIA next planned an elaborate scheme to storm bin Laden’s Tarnak farm but the plan was never approved by George Tenet and the Clinton administration.

Where earlier American policy toward Afghanistan was motivated solely by the attempt to kill Soviets, now the policy was motivated solely by attempt to get or kill bin Laden. Nothing else mattered to policy makers. The special group at the CIA assigned to deal exclusively with bin Laden were nicknamed the Manson Family for their rabid maniacal obsession.

Then bin Laden blew up two US embassies in Africa. The administration which was unwilling to endanger civilians in the Tarnak farm plan were suddenly willing to send missiles into Afghanistan to kill who knew who. Relying on typical bad CIA intelligence, Clinton authorized two missile strikes, one on a near empty training camp in Zawhar Kili and one on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The CIA had wanted to hit more targets. Critics called the strikes Clinton’s Wag the Dog strategy to divert attention away from his sex scandal and impeachment. A covert ground operation suddenly looked more attractive. Despite several opportunities including bin Laden’s presence in an isolated hunting camp for a week, the administration never authorized another strike. When CIA bad intelligence caused the US to blow up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake in 1999, Tenet and Clinton never authorized another serious attempt on bin Laden.

Throughout the Taliban and bin Laden Afghanistan era, the US continued to rely on Pakistan and Saudi intelligence even though both countries were actively supporting the Taliban and bin Laden was actively training Arab fighters that Pakistan could deploy in Kashmir in their conflict with India. Moussoud, who fought al Qaeda troops regularly and once trapped bin Laden behind his lines, never received serious US arms and support. Moussoud had to rely on Iranian and Russian support to stay in action. Moussoud was assassinated by jihadists on the eve of the September 11 attacks.

A new deal on the oil and gas pipeline was signed on 27 December 2002 by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan and in 2005 Asian Development Bank submitted the final version of feasibility study. The pipeline is currently stalled because the Taliban is still operating in areas crossed by the proposed pipeline.

For a complete look at the CIA’s failures see Legacy of Ashes.

For a closer look at the CIA’s efforts in Tibet see the CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.

Certainty, Madeleine Thein, 2006

Bike Path

Philosophy, (Bertrand) Russel had said, was a means to teach one how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.

Vancouver

An excellant first novel is a complex interwoven world ranging epoch of families over several generations compacted into a neat 300 pages. Particularly well done is the avoidance of referring to individual character’s race or group. Only by inference do we assume that central characters are Chinese, Malay, Canadian, or Dutch.

Included are Sandakan, British North Borneo, a small rubber plantation sea port, capital of Sabah, and site of a notorious Japanese prisoner of war camp, Hong Kong, site of another Japanese prisoner of war camp where a British soldier kept an encrypted diary, Jakarta, Melbourne, Vancouver, the Netherlands.

Jakarta

Characters are a Sandakan rubber plantation manager, his wife and son and the son’s best friend, a girl who becomes a talented fisherman and later becomes a photography shop assistant in Jakarta. The son goes to university in Melbourne where he meets the daughter of a Kowloon restauranter. They marry and move to Vancouver. Their daughter becomes a radio documentary maker and marries a Canadian pulminary disease specialist. The novel explores the costs of surviving the war and Japanese occupation, the end of colonial rule, both British and Dutch, in the region, the resulting family secrets, and the efforts of the younger generation to find those secrets. Also an exploration of death and loss.

Ysbrechtum Cottage

A Thousand Splendid Suns, 2007 Khaled Hosseini

This is the second novel by the author of The Kite Runner. Hosseini left Afghanistan as a child in 1980 during the Soviet occupation and is now a U.S. representative on the U.N. Refugee Agency.

This novel follows the lives of two Afghan women through the turbulant years from the 1960’s to the present. The older woman grew up near Herat, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant and a house maid. She lives with her mother in a small isolated hut and her father teaches her to fish on his occasional visits. A kindly old imman teaches her to read and write a little and to memorize prayers from the Koran. It will be her only education. When her mother dies in 1974, the father arranges for the girl to marry a much older Pashtun widower from Kabul, a cobbler with his own business. The cobbler has a violent temper and his abuse and mistreatment of the girl increases as she is unable to give him a son or any child.

In the meantime the Shah is overthrown and Afghanistan becomes a republic. Communists gain influence and by 1980 the Soviets have occupied the country. The Soviet period in Kabul represents a high water mark for women in Afghanistan with equal opportunities in education and professional careers.

The second girl in the novel grows up during this time. Her father is a professor and she attends a good school where she exels. Her best friend is a boy who lost a leg to a land mine. As they grow their friendship turns to romance. Her much older brothers have joined the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets. Reagan supplies them with Stinger missles and anti-tank weapons. The brothers die but the Soviets leave Afghanistan as their empire self destructs.

The Mujahideen now break into tribal factions fighting each other in the streets of Kabul, their leaders, Sayyaf, the Hazaras, Massoud, Hekmatyar, with the treacherous Uzbek Dostum waiting to choose sides. Civilians die as rockets hit houses and business in Kabul, women and children are raped, and civilians beaten and killed because of their tribal origin.

The one legged boy leaves with his family for Pakistan. A rocket hits the girl’s house killing her parents and wounding her. The cobbler and his wife rescue and take care of her. The cobbler asks the girl to become his second wife. The girl knows she is pregnant by her one legged lover and agrees to the marriage. The cobbler’s business is burned in a rocket attack and the family become destitute. By 1992 the Mujahideen are in control and name Afghanistan an Islamic state. Fighting continues.

The Taliban, led by illiterate Pashtun radicals educated in Saudi financed madrasas in the tribal areas of Pakistan emerge as a unified fighting force, taking city and region one after another. By 1996 they enter Kabul. Among their restrictive rules, girls are no longer allowed to attend school. The Mujahideen retreat to form the Northern alliance in northern Afghanistan. Bin Laden sets up Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

The one legged boy returns to Kabul and meets the girl, the cobbler tries to kill her and the first wife kills him. She is arrested by the Taliban and tried for murder while the one legged boy, girl, and children flee to Pakistan.

The Taliban destroy much of the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, and in 2001, they destroyed Bamiyan’s colossal Buddhas which stood for 1,500 years. Al-Qaeda attacks the U.S. and the U.S. declares war in 2002 against Afghanistan and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Some refugees, including the one legged boy and the girl, now married, and their children return to Kabul to assist with orphans and other refuges.

For more on the tribal areas of Pakistan, the arbitrary British border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Durand line drawn in 1893, and the story of the creation of Pakistan at the start of the cold war see.

A lone American former mountain climber, Greg Mortenson, worried about the absense of educational opportunities in isolated areas of Pakistan, has started a series of secular schools as an alternative to the radical madrasas which trained the Taliban. Mortenson has even negotiated successfully with Afghan drug warlords to be allowed build schools in isolated areas of Afghanistan.

The Lizard Cage, Karen Connelly,2005

This Canadian’s first novel is drawn from her experience living for two years on the Thailand Burma border. The cage is a fictional Burmese prison where the songbird, a songwriter singer, has been kept in solitary confinement in the teak box for seven years. His father died in prison while a political prisoner and his brother is a freedom fighter near the border. His mother sends him food and supplies, most of which are stolen by the guards. The songbird is reduced to catching and eating the small lizards that live in his cell, hence the name of the novel.

The novel is populated by a psychopathic, stupid guard who endangers everyone with his violence; by a humane guard who helps the songbird when he can and comes to know the songbird’s mother; and by a twelve year old orphan who has lived in the prison since his father, and employee at the prison, was killed by a truck when the boy was seven. Also figuring are other prison characters, the tiger, boss of the criminals, the fat corrupt cook, the huge silent Indian, and various other guards and inmates, and of course Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s symbol of democratic freedom.

The novel could be compared to the works of Alexander Solzenitzen on life in the Soviet Gulag; dark, soulless godless, places. Connelly’s songbird sees his imprisonment as an opportunity to meditate, fast, and seek enlightenment or Nirvana. The influences of Buddhism are everywhere in this novel as they are in Burmese life in spite of the repressive military dictatorship. The prison has an ancient tree that the inmates have turned into a Buddhist shrine.

The novel centers on a simple pen, originally intended to entrap the songbird and thus extend his prison sentence but instead becomes the mechanism changing the life of the orphan and allowing a poetic account of the cage to be smuggled to the world at large. The novel is well written and captivating.

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth, 1993

Born in Calcutta, Bengali Seth was educated at Oxford and Stanford, even attended school in Nanjing.

This massive 1500 page novel, one of the longest ever published, is centered on four very different families in the early 50s just after Independence.

The mother of 19 year old Lata is determined to find a suitable boy to marry Lata, just as Lata is determined to make up her own mind in the matter. She is to choose among three suitors; Kabir, Haresh and Amit.

Amit is a British educated, published Bengali poet, belonging to a wealthy Anglicized Calcutta family headed by an influential judge. Brother Dipankar is drawn to the mystic, and beautiful and amoral sisters Meenakshi and Kakoli, continually exchange verse couplets in a match of wits. Meenakshi is married to Lata’s brother.

The Kapoor’s charming son Maan, falls hopelessly in love with a Muslim singer and courtesan.

Haresh is a somewhat crude but good hearted and ambitious shoe manufacturing executive determined to break into the Czech dominated Bata quality shoe company near Calcutta.

The novel covers the period’s inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, politics, and academic affairs.

An Equal Music, Vikram Seth, 1999

This novel has nothing to do with India or Indians. It is a tale of the inner life of an English string quartet, Maggiore. The leader of the quartet, Michael, a poor working class boy, plays a valuable violin on permanent loan to the quartet. We see the jealousies and frictions among the members of the quartet forced to travel and spent most of their time together. We see the inner workings of booking agents and arranging tours for a successful but far from famous group.

The central plot starts when Michael discovers a version of Beethoven’s String Trio in C Minor, op. 1, no. 3 arranged for a string quintet in a dusty music store in London. The piece has not been performed in recent history or recorded by a modern string group. He wants the group to perform the challenging work in Vienna and to record it, but he must play second violin to make it work. He wants to play first violin. The Beethoven piece turns out to be a part of Michael’s romantic history from when he was studying in Vienna ten years ago. The group breaks up after the recording.

The novel really succeeds in taking you into the inner workings of a string quartet and the world of concert performances. Of the experience of writing this novel Seth has said “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Lost in Translation, Nicole Mones, 1998

Peking Man

This book is not to be confused with Sofia Coppola’s 2003 movie of the same name set in Tokyo. This novel, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, focuses on the mystery of Peking Man, the homo erectus remains found in Beijing in the 1920’s. Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was involved in the discovery, but was ordered by the church not to publish on the subject of evolution during his lifetime. Peking Man was lost during the Japanese occupation. The remains have never been found but the Chinese government formed a committee in 2005 to look for them officially.

In the novel an American archeologist has uncovered new information about the whereabouts of the remains he thinks were hidden by Teilhard de Chardin himself. He comes to China, hires an American woman living in Beijing, fluent in Chinese, as his interpreter and starts his search. The Chinese government assign two Chinese professors to accompany the Americans. Spies are everywhere. Their search takes them to the remote desserts of Northwest China. The interpreter becomes interested in the 23 year relationship between American Lucile Swan and Teilhard de Chardin whose voluninous letters to each other have just been published. Will they find the remains?

A Cup of Light, Nicole Mones, 2003

Southern Sung Celadon Cup

In this novel an American porcelain expert who speaks, reads, and writes, Chinese comes to Beijing to evaluate a newly uncovered collection of porcelain that may have belongs to the Imperial court. She is shocked to find 800 pieces of authentic looking porcelain worth maybe $150 million. Her expert colleague gets appendicitis and is left behind in Japan to recover so she must work alone.

She wears a visible hearing aid which she turns off when she wants to concentrate. Her special skill is a phenomenonally developed memory using imperial examination cubicles as a mnemonic device. She find several near perfect fakes but believes the collection to be largely authentic. One of the fakes is a Chenghua chicken cup. An original just sold at auction for $3.75 million.

Chenghua Chicken Cup

The big question for her is where did this large, previously unknown collection come from? There are sophisticated artwork smugglers (the penalty for getting caught is immediate execution), modern moguls, art dealers, and very talented modern day pot makers.

The heroin travels to Jingdezhen, center of porcelain production to the imperial court for a thousand years. During Mao’s time, huge factories turned out mass produced China to be exported to the world. Now Jingdezhen is reverting to its old cottage industry with small scale artisans producing high quality work. She has come looking for the notorious Master of the Ruffled Feather producer of some the finest fakes to reach museums in the West. The name comes from slight flourish in a painted feather which is the humerous signature of this forger. She is directed to an old master only to discover the notorious forger is his grandaughter, maybe 15. Her work has fooled experts around the world.

A Chinese Oregan software Billionaire and his wife are considering buying the entire collection. Is it authentic? If so, where has it been since leaving the forbidden city? Can it be smuggled out of China to Hong Kong? Of course, there is romance along the way.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, 1995

This novel by Bombay born Parsi Mistry won the Giller Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Winfried Holtby Prize, and the 1996 Los Angeles Times Award for fiction. Set in India during 1975-76 the time of Indira Gandhi’s massive corruption after she defied a court order to resign as prime minister by declaring a state of emergency. The daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi led India into its worst period threatening the very roots of democracy.

In this novel two untouchables of a sub caste condemned to leather tanning learn tailoring to escape their fate. When the local village tailor is forced out of business by mass-produced clothing, the tailors an uncle and nephew travel to Bombay to seek employment. They are hired by a Parsi widow determined to maintain an independent life by subcontracting to a woman selling designer women’s dresses for export.

The tailors rent sewing machines and move into a shantytown. Thugs recruiting slave workers for a pit mine abduct them. They escape. Greedy developers working with corrupt politicians destroy their shantytown. They help a beggar who turns out to be the king of beggars and he offers to protect, in return for money, the Parsi widow from her greedy landlord, who is trying to evict her. The nephew saves for a bride but when he returns to his village to arrange a marriage, he is abducted and forcibly sterilized under a population limit program gone horribly out of control with financial incentives, bribery, and quotas.

Rohinton Mistry

Overall a very sad book, perhaps the best novel depicting life for the powerless during this dark period of recent Indian history. Mistry, a marvelous storyteller, now lives in Canada. When he flies, he says he is always targeted for interrogation by security.